Rebuilding Karax

This is a conversation between a player that knows how to offensive cannon and a player that cannot.

I’ve seen allies taking over waves with energisers. Take control of all BCs and you no longer need AA.

And those batteries - with protos ally no one loses units till late game if Karax brings a probe to make some insta batteries.

And sure, Karax can’t clear a map with 1 unit like Nova/Keri/Dehaka, but do we need him to?

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What did Tychus and Abathur do to you?
Tychus needs only 3 units to clear any map and he gets two of them at 3 min. Aba needs 3 roaches/mutas and toxic nests. For minimal investment you get armies capable of carrying game on one base, but you get two bases!

The only recommendation here is to look at some games where your ally did a good job and learn from that. All comanders are really good, just a matter of finding how.

It is hard to learn these days, my last ally went BC rush with 2 BCs at 14 min mark, if you look at games like that - clearly Raynor sucks. So just a deep breath and move on, learn from good games and ignore ridiculous once.

I don’t get where the “slow” come from.

In fact, building your tech 4 minutes later not only mean that you get your good units too late, you also lost production time, meaning you have to build more robotics/stargates to compansate. The cost of these additional buildings will render the early expo moot and cause your first roll out extremely slow. When you have 1 base saturated and 1 robo, you will have non-stop production and still have minerals left over to build expo, by 8th minute you already have 3 immortals, an observer, 2 colossus and 2 energizer with fully saturated expo from only 2 warpgates and 1 robo. Because you are so gas starved and have chronowave you may not need more than 2 robos and 2 stargates even for the longer maps.

Your expo won’t be that much delayed. It is only saturated a few minutes later which the resource difference don’t really reflect because you need less production buildings.

I often find myself carrying the whole mission from beginning to the end, on most maps I can ignore ally and solo it no problem.

Co-op is not like versus. If you don’t lose units, you save resources, and you can actually save way more by getting tech fast enough and gain the ability to kill enemy waves without losing anything that cost resources to build. Did you ever end up with more than 15k minerals with 200/200 army at the end of mist opportunity? If I don’t build cannons which is relying on ally to defend this is what will happen on random brutal.

The really strong players in co-op are playing so much better that ally help isn’t required during any stage of the game. No need something to carry you from early to late, you almost don’t lose anything and kill everything, max out before 20min clearing all objectives in the process, because you have the right units at the right time and you know your deathball and calldown micro, that’s all the tricks to kill the enemy waves without losing a unit. You should also have enough minerals to build 30 or so cannons and batteries before your army supply reach max because of the lack of gas to actually fill the supply with proper units. If the game goes longer, you simply have no other option to spend minerals but to build more cannons.

Buy hey, most people lose 10~30% of their units per fight… no wonder they expand fast but sucked completely. The only commanders good for this type of play is raynor and zagara because their units are dirt cheap and have high dps compared to the economy they have. Everyone else use hero or calldowns to prevent unit losses because these abilities do not cost resources.

Karax don’t have free summon, but he have free heal, SoA and units spells that are comparable to tychus abilities. If you don’t lose outlaw playing tychus, you shouldn’t lose units in your karax deathball either. Picking the right outlaws is more or less the same as picking the right units to build, and fighting with spells and abilities while kiting or disabling dangerous units, nuke the biggest wave with calldown is exactly the same style as tychus.

The signature strength of karax deathball is speed buff allowing his compact deathball to kite, which is unique among co-op commanders. The buffed carriers and mirages can fire on the move that will kill the scourges and mutalisks without much issue. Siege up observer when kiting allowing you to orbital strike the siege units (tempest/carrier/guardian/BL/tank/liberator/BC/reaver/disruptor etc) at the enemy rear, while destroying front units with the deathball taking zero losses. When played correctly the battles are very one-sided even though your deathball looks tiny compared to the enemy wave.

I talked about the same issue before pointing out that players usually see karax units as weak, as karax deathball is a-move unfriendly. You actually have to babysit your units and use abilities during major battles so that they don’t get killed randomly, much like tychus. It is harder to micro gravitron beam or shadow cannon but if you have upgraded SoA you don’t have to use these.

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Ok, let’s say for simplicity that I am going mass carrier. What’s my opener.

Well, with full chrono mastery (as that’s what I’ve played recently) your non-probe expenditures go

pylon-gas-gas-forge-expo pylon-cannon-cannon-gate-SoA lvl. 1

Depending on map and such, you may or may not need to next squeeze in a pylon and cannon in front to kill the first wave. If not, just go pylon-cyber.

With this build, you expand around 3:00-3:30, largely depending on that early defense cannon question, and your first pair of carriers with +1 weapons can enjoy a chrono surge to get them out a little before 6 minutes.

From there, constant dual carrier production with plenty of minerals for cannons and batteries.

With a pair of sentinels instead of cannons, you can expand at a similar time, and if you go for Immortals or mirages rather than carriers, you can have those units out faster, though the builds get a lot messier and are affected by far more map/comp/teammate/etc. Related factors. In the meantime, you (with chrono) finished SoA lvl.1 around 3:00 into the game, so you have a fair bit of ammo to work with when those units come out or if your ally attacks pre-6:00 mark.

I agree that Karaxs unit tax is misplaced nowadays.

I think it is in blatant conflict with the unit upgrades that karax has to get.

You pay +30% additional cost to get the basic units with no special abilities… only after some questionable upgrade do Karax’s units gain some special ability. But that upgrade has a cost as well… so you pay twice to get your shiny units with special abilities. That is broken in my opinion.

And then some unit upgrades are just not worth much, which leaves karax with just bad costly units.

For example, consider Karaxs carriers… their repair drones are worthless as far as i am concerned. If karax could build regular carriers at regular cost with no repair drones, that would MASSIVELY buff his carrier army. He could have 30% more carriers with passive healing from the SoA.

So a “downgrade” to regular carriers would actually be an upgrade for him… let that statement sink in for a minute.

Similar story with immortals. Shadow cannon looks shiny and can do some burst damage… but even if you have 10, its only 2000 damage per salvo. At 45s coodlown… that is 4.4 DPS per immortal if you use the ability on cooldown. That is less than an unstimmed marine. Is that worth +30% increased unit cost and 200/200 for the upgrade? Not in my world.

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Oh, it occurs to me that you’re talking in general, not just the fast expand thing from before.

I think that Karax isn’t necessarily that slow, but that with everyone else’s reworks the pacing of co-op increased dramatically.

The “slowest” commanders are probably Raynor, Swann, Alarack, and Karax.

Raynor seems fast, but building up all those orbitals and rax together makes him lag a little behind early on, for a big payoff later. Still, his rework brought him a buff to cooldown mastery on the Hyperion, improving your options for early calldowns, though this doesn’t really help people who use banshees anyways. I think Raynor’s in a pretty good spot.

Alarack with rework got slayer buffs, small Alarack hero unit buffs, and structure overcharge buffs, but more importantly he has an actual hero unit from the start anyways.

Swann got the best deal from the rework. Shorter SCV build time, better laser drill mastery for real fast drill, better thors for people who want to actually micro those (they have their niche where hercules/Thor outperforms Hercules/tank). And even better hellbats for anyone who uses those.

Karax got… I think there was a slightly cheaper level 2 and 3 spear of Adun upgrades? The only real benefit of the rework seemed to me to be his new unity Barrier. Which is good and all, but not quite as much oomph as I think Karax needed.

But yes, I do agree that Karax’s deathball does snowball well if you are cautious with it from the early game. You’re right of course, you shouldn’t be losing units early, excepting for possibly some sentinels if you are using those. And you can do a lot with early orbital strikes and tech units if you have good micro. So yes, Karax can function early game.

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You are conflating early expo with early fight. Karax can fast expo and fight early effectively

I play Brutal exclusively. A 100% win rate is normal. We are not concerned with losing units and “sucking”. The issue is that your one base tech is unnecessary and loses steam. It is slow

Chronoboost catches up production instantly, so no, you don’t need extra production facilities. Since early expo can chrono saturate asap, the next chrono will also come sooner, which means the deathball catches up even more rapidly and then surpasses because the economy has already been booming

By not building early expo, you are missing out on those resources, instead you will have to wait for them

Early Karax can already fight with just zealots energizers and spear. Especially if you save minerals by not building a single cannon

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As to a commander that is good with a slow expo, H&H comes to mind

Instead try fast immortal and robo bay before nexus, you will not be disappointed. If you ever tried it you will actually be disappointed on how inferior and weak sentinels openings are, because immortals don’t die to adepts/reaper/roach and using sentinels cannot outrange static defense before the 7 minute mark (and push with impunity with invincible deathball) by rushing for the thermal lance. Siege observer and orbial enemy caster, air and heavy ground, buff your colossus and kite, enemy just can’t do anything to your army from the first engagement to the last.

You need to realize 5~6 mineral patches is not a lot of income (about 500~600 minerals per minute for a saturated expansion). Delaying tech and getting sentinel research can actually hurt the mid game that you start losing more units than you have gained by fast expanding, and everything beyond is a net loss.

Getting the units that gives the most value (by killing the enemy for free) and keeping them alive is a much more powerful play you should really try out.

Fast Immortal I often do, but what’s with the robo bay? What, are you going to rush shadow cannon for your 1 immortal? For the cost of robo bay + shadow cannon, you can get twighlight + lvl.2 Spear of Adun, which is enough orbital strikes that you would need several Immortals before your shadow cannons are more valuable.

Personally, I would think that robo-immortal-nexus would work better. Of course, I generally just expand with 2 sentinels, use the sentinels to provide vision for the first obj, and then have them stay at home until I have reconstruction. The first 2 immortals come out together with the chrono surge.

To me Raynor comes to mind. With enough orbital commands, chances are you won’t even see much of a difference in his army and upgrades aside from more marines than usual.

This is news to me. I’ll have to see if I can pull this off.

I’ve done this with Fenix, but that’s b/c he has that talent that lets him ignore building prereqs, gas costs, and half of their mins cost.

Another “dissenting opinion”. I’ve played with Karax players that don’t build a single cannon! That blew my mind. It’s like Zagara not using her (free) Banelings. It may be unconventional, but it’s gotten the job done!

I tried that.

I might need a replay, because what I did happened to be the most disappointing experience I ever had playing Karax. I personally still prefer sentinel openers, but I’m open to learning new stuff with Karax.

Sentinel openers can be solid enough that you wont build a single cannon. Specially effective if you’re not fighting Zerg. A few energizers with reclamation, or maybe a bunch of immortals later and Lv3 SoA and the map is yours.

I’ve been experimenting with all sorts of openers lately, recently developed one that gets expo decently early (I think around 4 minute mark), and you start with 4 upgraded sentinels and an energizer. Still polishing it, might require some changes, but it is doing decently well.

Exactly why it’s convenient that you can tell if the map is going to feature Zerg or not from the 0 second mark based on the presence or absence of creep.

I personally open with cannons instead against zerg, since I don’t have as much incentive to get fast twilight for reclamation, so I cannon expand and possibly cannon first obj (map based) and then fast tech.

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Can we also fix a couple of things about Karax?
Namely his issue with secondary Nexi chronos not being active upon finishing construction, and Karax saving his “Chrono Boost online” for when you use Surge instead of when Chrono Boost comes online at like 20s in.

Playing Karax is like playing chess.

Conventional way is Sentinel or Pawn D2-D4
Eco-wh0re way is fast expand Pawn B2-B3
Immortal opening is like Knight B1-C3
And cannon opener is C2-C4

It’s very funny in that once Karax makes some wrong move and lose a huge group of units. He is forever crippled till late game which many power houses usually don’t have a problem with except may be Swann or Nova.

Can someone explain to me why sentinel opener is even a thing, or why they’re considered conventional? What are 5 sentinels going to do vs even 1 attack wave? They might be able to get some value on RtK’s first shard, but even then, those 500 minerals (even more if you invest in additional gateways to make multiple of them early) could be an immortal, which will do any job much better and quicker. I mean immortals will carry to the mid/late game much better than sentinels too, so why not rush for immortals to get the numbers up sooner?

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2 sentinels will clump an attack wave for the half a second needed for the Spear of Adun to pummel them. They also provide vision while being capable of soaking a bit of static defense damage, which again lets them basically just be Spear suppliments.

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It does relatively the same thing. Both Sentinel x 5 and Immortal x 1 will allow SoA to strike kill.

Output in damage is higher with Sentinels, and they also benefit fully from the Repair Beam despite Immortal’s tankiness as a stand-alone comparison.

Immortal has higher later value for sure and works fine. It is also less forgiving though should the player lose it to poor engagement. Perhaps that’s the reason why many people less commonly choose it over Sentinel.

All of that said, one is not better than the other at all. Sentinels are technically more resource wasteful while Immortal is less early-game coverage friendly.

This is where your strong advocacy for one base makes up for your choice of Immortal. However, I definitely disagree that it is a better opening. The 2 base, fast expand robo play is by far more optimal. Two things to note:

  1. 2base has slightly slower Immortal for obvious reasons but given the timing makes no practical impact.
  2. Mid game transition, where 2base robo overtakes 1base opener, punishes hard during this phase.

You should know this from playing 1base so much (based on your posts). None of the discussed opening/choice is poor. Karax is on the more dynamic side in terms of opening, as is part of his difficulty to master in some regards.

Karax still need a bit of a boost, of which many of the topics created have highlighted again and again. Those changes would shine a new light in his overall speed. That said, people shouldn’t mistake that from his current standing - that is he functions fine but with a definite slow ramp during early game.